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This time of year typically brings us a slew of holiday themed television and lots of list-y goodness celebrating the best in pop culture from the year that was. In an effort to combine these two end-of-year staples, I thought I’d compile my definitive list of the best holiday episodes EVER.

I’m sure I’ve overlooked a few classics. But pointing out the holes is half the fun of the list, right? So, let the countdown begin:

10. The O.C.: “The Best Chrismukkah Ever”
As I am myself the product of a Jewish father and a shiksa mother, I have to give credit to The O.C. for combining the best of Christmas and Hanukkah into one über-holiday. (It’s hard to go wrong when you’ve got both Jesus and Moses on your side.) The episode also features all the hallmarks of classic season one The O.C.: a love triangle, a Newport Beach party, a drunken Marissa Cooper… and a partridge in a pear tree.

9. A Very Brady Christmas (1988)
I admit this one may be a bit of a cheat, since it’s actually a made-for-TV movie. However, it did launch the short-lived “adult” series The Bradys, and so it makes the list. The family Brady reunites at the old homestead, but holiday cheer is low as all the kids are now dealing with grown-up problems. Greg and his wife can’t agree on where to spend the holidays; Peter is dating his female boss who (horror!) makes more money than him; Jan is having marital problems of her own; Bobby wants to be a racecar driver; Cindy is still tired of being treated like the baby; and former cheerleader Marcia somehow ended up married to an oaf named Wally. Even poor Alice is back with her old employers, having split with Sam the Butcher. But, in true Brady fashion, the family puts their problems aside and pulls together when Mike gets trapped inside a caved-in building. The whole thing is deliciously, unironically campy, but I challenge you not to choke up just a little bit when Mike emerges from the rubble as Carol and the kids sing “O Come All Ye Faithful”.

8. The Simpsons: “Grift of the Magi”
During the past 20 seasons there have been many a holiday-themed Simpsons episode—but only one that features an appearance by a wee, animated Gary Coleman as a toy factory security guard who tries to stop Lisa, Bart and Homer from destroying an evil toy called Funzo.

7. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Amends”
Angel—recently returned from a Hell dimension—is haunted by the ghosts of his murderous past. While trying to help him, Buffy encounters the First Evil (who we meet again as the big bad of season 7) and snow falls on Sunnydale after a poignant confrontation between the star (sun?) crossed lovers.

6. Frasier: “Merry Christmas, Mrs. Moskowitz”
A classic example of the kind of highbrow farce that was Frasier’s stock in trade. In order to not upset the mother of his latest girlfriend, Frasier pretends to be Jewish—meaning he has to frantically scramble to hide the Christmas ham, the tree and his brother Niles (the sublime David Hyde Pierce), who happens to be dressed as Jesus. Frasier and his father also attempt to have an emotional heart-to-heart, with disastrous results. “We never should have tried this, we’re not Jewish!”

5. The West Wing: “Noel”
Season one’s “In Excelisus Deo” is often held up as the gold standard of West Wing holiday epsiodes, but I’m always partial to a Josh Lyman-centric story, so I’m going with season two’s melancholic “Noel.” Still dealing with the fallout of the Rosslyn shooting, Leo calls in a psychiatrist (Adam Arkin) to help Josh come to terms with his post-traumatic stress disorder. The episode’s emotional climax is juxtaposed with a haunting performance by Yo-Yo Ma, and ends with a rather lovely moment in which Leo tells Josh, “as long as I got a job, you got a job.”

4. 30 Rock: “Ludachristmas”
Not wanting to spend the holiday with his irascible mother (hilariously played by Elaine Stritch), Jack attaches himself to Liz’s more wholesome family (including guest stars Buck Henry and Andy Richter, also hilarious). Meanwhile, over in the B plot, Tracy is forced into sobriety by a court-ordered alcohol monitoring device that threatens to put a damper on the annual “Ludachristmas” celebration, and Kenneth’s attempts to impart the true spirit of the holiday season leads to the group attempting to chop down the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.

3. Seinfeld: “The Strike”
This episode did more than just create a pop culture buzzword; it invented an entirely new holiday. Frank Costanza introduced the world to Festivus (for the rest of us), a holiday that includes a celebratory aluminum pole, feats of strength and the all-important airing of grievances.

2. Veronica Mars: “An Echolls Family Christmas”
There’s not much comfort and joy in Neptune as Veronica is enlisted to find out who stole Weevil’s winnings in a high stakes poker game at the Echolls’ house. (“Annoy tiny blonde one, annoy like the wind!”) Meanwhile, Veronica’s P.I. dad tries to protect movie star Aaron Echolls (Harry Hamlin) from a stalker. Secrets are revealed and plots become twistier in one of the cleverest episodes of the brilliant teen noir series.

1. The Office (UK): Christmas Special (Parts 1 & 2)
Before Jim and Pam, there was Tim and Dawn. The original BBC mockumentary about office drones at a paper company consisted of 12 perfect episodes of bone-dry British humor and concluded with a two-part Christmas special that gave its characters (and viewers) the happy ending they deserved. Tim and Dawn find love and even buffoonish, ex-boss David Brent finds a measure of redemption in a special that also stands as one of the best series finales of all time.

This was the decade in which television became art. So argues Emily Nussbuam in a recent New York Magazine essay, “When TV Became Art”. She certainly makes a strong case that 2000-2009 was a pivotal age for TV and I strongly recommend her essay to anyone interested in the development of television over the past decade. I agree that this was, all in all, the finest decade for great television.

Others have argued that TV had arisen as an art form in earlier decades, some (though in dwindling numbers) arguing for the fifties, based on the series that presented staged plays for a television audience, including such original masterpieces as “Twelve Angry Men”, written by Reginald Rose for Studio One, and “Requiem for a Heavyweight”, written by Rod Serling for Playhouse 90. Later, Robert J. Thompson, in his widely cited Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, argued for the eighties as the crucial period. But Nussbaum has numbers on her side; it is difficult to argue against the sheer quantity of very fine shows that emerged in the past ten years. The number of truly great series from the past ten years is so substantial that it might surpass the number of great shows from all previous decades combined.

Nonetheless, I want to take issue with Nussbaum. I think that chopping the overall picture up into decade-sized blocks obscures the reality. I believe that one can point at a precise point where TV became art, and that point was the debut of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. No one questions the enormous influence that Joss Whedon’s quirky series exerted on other shows, but I do not believe that many people realize the degree to which it altered the TV landscape. TV was not art before Buffy, but it was afterwards.

In contrast, the show that Nussbaum promotes as the apex of TV as Art, The Wire, has not actually played a crucial role in that development. The Wire is a beneficiary of the birth of TV as art, a promulgator of that development, not its cause. There is no question it is a truly great show, but it really did nothing to change TV. Television had already changed, and we largely have Buffy to thank for that. To be fair, Nussbaum does mention Buffy and Joss Whedon frequently in her essay, obviously crediting both the show and the creator for much of the best that the decade had to offer, but she seems to imply that TV as art was a work in progress as the decade began and it most definitely was not.

Although many realize just how revolutionary Buffy was as a series and the impact that it made on the medium (many TV creators site it as their favorite show while others acknowledge its direct influence), not everyone is aware of how groundbreaking the series was or of the number of concrete changes it wrought on television. It was not merely a great TV series in its own right, it helped redefine what TV could do. Let me enumerate some of the changes made, all of them rather substantial.

One of the most important changes that Buffy brought about was a new understanding of long story arcs on TV. A very brief history of narrative on television is in order to provide a context for my point. For most of the history of television, the format of series was episodic. On almost all shows (excepting soap operas), no matter what happened on one episode of a series, the next week would witness a complete reset. If James West was beaten to a pulp or even shot on The Wild, Wild West, the next week he would be as fine as ever.

No matter what happens on The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dick and Laura would never refer to it again. As a result, each episode was self-contained and ignored any kind of narrative order. Watch the episodes of It Takes a Thief in any order that you wish; juxtapose an episode from season four and then from season two and it wouldn’t make the slightest difference. This began to change with Hill Street Blues and the shows that Robert J. Thompson applauded: St. Elsewhere, China Beach, L. A. Law, and thirtysomething. For the first time on primetime television, stories got messy and spilled over from one episode to another…

Dear reader:

Joss Whedon’s importance in contemporary pop culture can hardly be overstated, but there has never been a book providing a comprehensive survey and analysis of his career as a whole—until now. Published to coincide with Whedon’s blockbuster movie The Avengers, Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion by PopMatters (May 2012) covers every aspect of his work, through insightful essays and in-depth interviews with key figures in the ‘Whedonverse’. This article, along with previously unpublished material, can be read in its entirety in this book.

There is a show on the air right now that is claiming to be Scrubs, but it clearly is not the same show. It is like a cloned sheep that looks a lot like the original, but every time it tries to walk it falls over and starts to shudder. Something just is not right with it.

Scrubs ran for eight years. It was one of the most consistently funny programs on TV. The combination of humor and pathos was pitch perfect for the hospital setting. The characters all grew beyond their original one-note set-ups. Even the minor characters were three-dimensional. And it went off the air last spring with one of the most satisfying finale episodes I’ve ever seen. I laughed, I cried, I reached closure.

But now it is back with about half the old cast. The new version seems intent on recycling key plot lines from previous seasons, perhaps thinking that the move to a new network also means that there is an entirely new audience. The result is vaguely familiar and ultimately unsatisfying.

I wish that Scrubs had gone the traditional spin-off route instead. Take one or two minor characters, put them front and center and name the show after them (see Maude or Frasier).

I nominate Ted and Gooch. Call it Ted and Gooch.

Sam Lloyd was so good as Ted the hapless hospital lawyer that I would start to laugh every time he appeared on screen. He sang TV theme songs with an a capella group, lived with his mom, dreamed of standing up to his boss and had one particularly memorable moment where he lost a battle of wits to a dog. In Scrubs’ sort-of final season, Ted found love with Gooch (Kate Micucci), a ukulele playing oddball who was his perfect match.

In the first three episodes of Scrubs Reloaded, Ted was nowhere to be seen. Then, in episode four, Ted and Gooch came back for one last goodbye before heading off in an RV to visit every state in the U.S. That’s your spin-off right there. Ted and Gooch Hit the Road. I’d watch that (but in the meantime I’ll have to settle for streaming Best of Ted clips online).

Last Sunday, two girlfriends and I met up for a hike, followed by lunch. While we huffed and grunted our way up hills, and then proceeded to replace the calories we’d burned with burgers and fries, we talked about the usual things: our relationships, our careers, whether we want to have kids and when, our frustrations with the adult world and all its associated problems and responsibilities.

And then, on Monday, I watched the three main characters of the new TNT show Men of a Certain Age do pretty much the exact same thing.

The show has certainly generated some early buzz, partly because it features three highly recognizable actors and has been relentlessly promoted, but mostly because everything about Men of a Certain Age—from the title to the Wonder Years-esque opening credits to the characters’ discussions about the size of their manly posteriors—evokes a kind of touchy-feeliness that has historically been the domain of female-centric shows like Sex and the City or Grey’s Anatomy.

The low-key dramedy centers around three middle-aged friends (Ray Romano, Scott Bakula and Andre Braugher) who are dealing with marital rifts, faltering careers, receding hairlines and thickening waistlines. They are indeed men of a certain age—pushing 50 with trepidation and mired in emotional baggage. For anyone who laments the erosion of traditional masculinity in American culture, this is not the show for you. Based on the promos, a friend of mine suggested the show would be better titled, “Men with [lady parts].”

The show’s premise appears to hinge on this conspicuous upending of TV gender roles. (Meanwhile the ladies of cable TV, Glenn Close, Kyra Sedgwick and Holly Hunter, continue their regularly scheduled program of kicking ass and taking names.) I’m no proponent of hyper-masculinity, and I think there certainly is a place in the television landscape for a show that explores male relationships outside of the testosterone-fueled, eternal frat boy model. The best thing Men of a Certain Age has going for it so far is that it’s refreshing to see men on TV actually acting their age. The pilot’s greatest flaw is that I don’t believe that men of a certain age—or of any age for that matter—really relate to each other this way. Moments like the one where Romano’s character gazes wistfully out of the diner window and muses, “you look in the mirror, you see yourself . . . you recognize yourself, and there’s that little bit of you that you don’t”, strike me as deeply disingenuous. For most of the episode it feels as though the show is working too strenuously to hone in on the expansive female angst market.

Men of a Certain Age isn’t even television’s first foray into this arena. Way back in 2001, NBC brought us The Other Half, otherwise known as “The View With Dudes”, featuring Mario Lopez, Danny Bonaduce, and Dick Clark as hosts of the morning chat show. In 2007, Dylan McDermott and Michael Vartan starred in the short-lived Big Shots about a group of CEOs with girl problems. Neither of these efforts proved very successful, but Men of Certain Age has a better pedigree and garnered a solid audience and generally positive reviews for its pilot episode, so it will be interesting to see how things progress. Maybe the world is finally ready to watch a group of straight guys obsessing about the size of their butts. However, given that I am decidedly fed up with the hysterical aging woman stereotype (I’m talking to you, Courteney Cox), I can’t say that I see much appeal in watching these characters follow their female peers into a tired trope.

If you want to watch men talking to each other in a diner, I suggest watching the 1982 Barry Levinson film Diner instead. The film captures the depth of male friendships in a way that feels more authentic, with less angst and more funny.

The transition to college has always been particularly treacherous territory for teen shows. High school is such fertile ground to mine for drama, full as it is of angst and social hierarchy and romantic growing pains. High school is awful and wonderful in ways that are essentially universal. But college is different. College is where the common experiences of growing up start to diverge. College cultivates individualism instead of squashing it. College is fun, which is good for real life, but rarely as the setting for a one-hour drama.

Interestingly, Gossip Girl, which just wrapped up its fall season, seems to be navigating the waters better than many of its predecessors. Which is to say that the shift to college life hasn’t had much of an impact at all so far. This isn’t necessarily a compliment, because Gossip Girl was never really a show about high school to begin with. It’s about sex, fashion, scheming and beautiful people being young and rich in New York. Occasionally there had been a storyline revolving around college visits or an affair with a teacher (I’m fairly certain there’s never been a scene set in an actual classroom), but the show has rarely delved far enough into the inner lives of its characters for them to demonstrate any real emotional evolution or coming of age. Where the beautiful people spend their time—high school, college campuses, penthouse apartments, coffee shops—doesn’t really matter. It’s all just window dressing anyway.